EHarmony Case Study - Essay Example

The advent of new technologies has facilitated this change in social media and has made it a common activity. By 2005, the number of subscribers and user of social media and internet personals websites had increased with eHarmony recording over 15 million subscribers. This growth was attributed to a change in online dating perception. Currently, the social media industry has become extremely competitive and lucrative with companies employing different strategies to capture the market and increase customer base.

Organizations have realized that apprehending the competitive forces and their fundamental roots discloses the causes of the industry’s present productivity (Porter, 2008). By the time online dating was gaining popularity, there had been few internet personals websites. For this reason, there was less competition in the industry. In the contemporary, competitive business environment, publicity is a significant facet of any organization. This therefore poses a great threat to the existing business as more and more new entries are aiming the market in order to gain a share of the profits.

This is therefore threatening the dominance of companies such as eHarmony an aspect that might affect even the overall returns of the company. The marketing strategy in the social media industry determines the profit potentiality of the company. For instance, Piskorski et al (2008) asserts that eHarmony centered on creating publicity through the owners who appeared in TV and radio programs including home news programs. The company focused on selling its unique features which yielded increased number of subscribers.

According to Walker et al (2005), this is a competitive advantage that the company used to acquire a greater market share. In addition, eHarmony heightened its advertising campaigns in the radios and TV to capture wide audience. The contemporary social media have been characterized by fraudsters who have made people lose hope in finding serious mates in the internet personals websites. Arguably, social media sites have tried to employ a personality profile based on many questions, which discourage the not serious users from joining the site (Alex, 2010).

For instance, eHarmony personality profile contains 258 questions, which portray seriousness of the subscriber. One of the major threats that online dating poses is erosion of culture. Initially, people had the chance to select his/her mate physically. This gave the person a chance to analyze the mate’s behavior and attitudes. With the current technology, this aspect has eroded. In addition young people will be exposed to early relationships an aspect that could expose them to early sex and marriages.

This market therefore will lead to increased divorces and abusive marriages due to poor decision making before choosing the partner (Alex, 2010).. Increase of companies such as eHarmony would therefore reduce the time that was previously used to know your partner which is a threat to the new families. The company faces a great threat from ghost companies which retrieve money from the customers only to for the client to realize that the site has very few members. This mistrust by people creates a great threat to expansion of the company an aspect that hinders it to reach global standards.

Another major threat that if facing companies such as eHarmony is lack of adequate resources to keep up with the increasing technological competition which makes communication easier. This